Deaths in British police custody: no convicted officers since 1969

827 people have died during or following police contact since 2004. Families have struggled
hard for justice, encountering multiple failures and police collusion from the
IPCC. Why is police accountability failing in this most serious of issues?

Christopher Alder, a
trainee computer programmer and former British Army paratrooper who had served
in the Falklands War and Northern Ireland, died face down, handcuffed, with his
trousers around his ankles on the floor of a police station in Hull in April
1998. Alder, a 37-year-old black man, had been assaulted outside a night club
and taken to a local hospital, where he was arrested by officers for an alleged
breach of the peace following complaints about his behaviour from nursing
staff.

While fit enough to get
into a police van by himself, CCTV footage shows
that upon arrival at the police station, Alder was unconscious when dragged
from the van and placed on the floor of the custody suite. Officers treated Alder
like an animal, completely neglecting him while he lay dying on the floor.
Officers calmly chatted among themselves, one of them suggesting he was faking
illness. Eleven minutes later, when officers finally realised he had stopped
breathing, attempts to resuscitate him came too late. It was later revealed
that CCTV had captured the officers making monkey noises at the police station that night. Alder died on the scene.

A familiar
pattern

Following his death, Alder’s sister Janet launched a long struggle for justice, one that continues to this
day. In 2000 a coroner’s jury returned a verdict of unlawful killing, and in
2002 five police officers went on trial accused of manslaughter and misconduct
in public office. All were cleared on the orders of the judge. An internal
disciplinary inquiry by Humberside Police cleared the officers of any
wrongdoing. In 2006, an Independent Police Complaints Commission report
concluded that four of the officers present in the custody suite when Alder
died were guilty of the "most serious neglect of
duty", but the officers responsible walked free. Successive
Humberside Police chiefs have failed to act on the conduct of the officers
involved.

Alder’s death, the
acquittal of officers involved, and the family’s subsequent struggle for truth
and justice is a pattern familiar to many families in Britain – so exquisitely
documented in the 1999 film Injustice. The last time a police officer was
successfully prosecuted for the death of somebody in custody was in 1969, when
the two Leeds Police officers responsible for the death of David Oluwale, the first black man to
die in police custody in the UK, were found guilty of assault and sentenced to
a mere few months in prison. There have been over 1,000 further deaths in
custody since. However there has not been a single successful prosecution
against any police officer involved in these deaths – despite several verdicts
of unlawful killing, most recently in the case of Azelle Rodney.
Crucially, these verdicts were handed down only after years of tireless
campaigning and painstaking legal challenges by the families of those who lost
their lives in custody, many of which are affiliated to the United Families and Friends Campaign.

Who polices
the police?

Whenever there is a death
in custody, the police have to call in the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC). The statutory obligation of the IPCC is to secure and
maintain public confidence in the system of complaining against the police.
Time and again, however, the organisation has shown itself not to be on the
side of the complainant, but on the side of the officers it is supposed to
investigate.

The IPCC, which over
2012/13 had a budget of £32.5 million and around 400 staff, has proven to be
both toothless and biased towards police officers. Whilst it claims to treat
the place where a suspicious death in custody has occurred like a crime scene,
this is rarely the case. It cannot compel officers to give evidence, and it has
historically been reluctant to act with suspicion towards officers involved in
custody deaths. The majority of senior investigators within the IPCC are
ex-police officers. Since its formation in 2004, 827 people have died during or
following police contact. Not a single police officer has been convicted in
relation to any of these deaths.

In the case of Sean Rigg, who died at Brixton
police station in August 2008, the IPCC did not get to the police
station until three hours after he had been formally declared dead, and did not
enter the scene where he died until seven hours afterwards. It later emerged
that upon arriving to the police station, IPCC investigators had gone into
meetings with police officers to prepare a press release, which was later found
to be riddled with inaccuracies. It had reproduced the officers’ version of
events – Rigg had assaulted a police officer, and he had simply “collapsed”
upon arrival to the police station. It also said he had died in hospital, in
what the family regards as an attempt to disassociate what had happened at the
police station from his death. All of this was later found to be untrue.

Unhappy with the way they
were treated by the IPCC, and the watchdog’s investigation, Rigg’s brother and
two sisters launched their own investigation, detailed in the 2012 Migrant
Media film Who Polices The Police? The family had to fight tooth and nail to get disclosures from the
IPCC investigation and demanded a number of pre-inquest reviews. They also
managed to obtain an order from the coroner to enter the IPCC’s offices to look
at “unused material,” which according to investigators was not relevant at the
time. This is precisely where the family found the most seriously incriminating
evidence against police officers in
the case.

The inquest into Rigg’s death returned a narrative verdict which concluded that the police had
used "unsuitable and unnecessary force" on him, that officers failed
to uphold his basic rights and that the failings of the police "more than
minimally" contributed to his death. Following the verdict the IPCC
commissioned an external review of its own investigation, the findings of which were critical,
but the report fell short of proposing any genuine reform of the watchdog. In
March 2013, three police officers were arrested on suspicion of perverting the
course of justice with regard to evidence given at Rigg's inquest. They are yet
to be charged.

More IPCC complicity

Similar evidence of IPCC complicity
with police officers was found in the case of Mark Duggan, who was
shot in Tottenham, north London, in August 2011, and whose death sparked five
of days of rioting in several English cities. Three months after his death it
was discovered that the minicab in which he was travelling before he was shot
was moved by police officers after the shooting. It was revealed that removal
of the cab, containing forensic and other evidence of major significance, had
been sanctioned by IPCC investigators before they had even reached the scene.

Earlier this month, two
years after Duggan’s death, the IPCC investigation into the
shooting has found no evidence of
any criminal offence, suggesting it is set to conclude the killing was lawful.
However, none of the 11 firearms officers at the scene of the Duggan shooting
who were asked to attend interviews have answered oral questions from the IPCC,
instead supplying written answers. The officer who shot Duggan, only known as
V53, did attend, but declined to answer questions orally, instead submitting
written answers two days later.

The IPCC was also partially
responsible for creating the false public perception that Duggan had shot at
police first. As was the case with Sean Rigg, the IPCC press release
reproduced a police lie, and fed this to the media. The police know
that the first bit of information about any incident is going to stick in the
public’s mind – it gives them a chance to fix the story. The IPCC allowed the
Metropolitan Police to do this. The mass media swallowed the shoot-out story,
and the tabloids proceeded to portray Duggan as a gangster and a drug dealer,
as if its job was to make the killing acceptable to the public. What they were
less keen to report was that neither Duggan's DNA nor
fingerprints have been recovered from
the weapon or the sock it was contained in, and the weapon was found between 10
and 14ft from where he fell, after he was shot twice. The Duggan family hope
the truth will come in the inquest next month, but either way, the image
of the IPCC as an independent watchdog, capable of holding the police to account,
lay in tatters once again.

The IPCC also found no
evidence of criminal wrongdoing in the case of Azelle Rodney, who was shot dead in Edgware,
north London, by a police marksman in 2005. But in July 2013, a public inquiry chaired by a retired High Court judge concluded the killing was
unlawful. The Crown Prosecution Service is currently considering whether or not
to bring criminal charges against E7, the armed officer who fired eight bullets
at Rodney, four of which hit him in the head.

Radical
reform

What makes the issue of deaths
in police custody a major problem for the legitimacy of the British state, with
its tradition of policing by consent, is that a number of key institutional
state mechanisms interact in ways which mean proper accountability of officers
is not achieved in many of these cases. Within Britain’s migrant communities,
this lack of access to state justice ties in with a broader experience of
everyday racism, a lack of opportunities in the job market, and continuous
police harassment such as through stop and search. In Tottenham, a death in
custody has led to large-scale rioting twice in the last 30 years.

Recent revelations have shown that Janet Alder was one of many people campaigning for
justice who was placed under police surveillance as part of an undercover
police effort to smear anti-racism
campaigners. Around the same time, it came to light that a former
police chief, Sir Norman Bettison, who was involved in the cover-up of police
errors during the Hillsborough disaster,
allegedly tried to influence the way a witness
gave evidence at a public inquiry
following the murder of Stephen Lawrence. Independent investigative journalism
and tireless grassroots campaigning have led to these facts being revealed;
they were not borne out of any government-backed investigations.

Prosecuting the police
through the existing judicial system has proven to be inadequate. A coroner’s
jury handed down a verdict of unlawful killing in the case of Ian Tomlinson in May 2011, yet PC Simon Harwood, the officer responsible for his
death, was acquitted in a criminal trial in July 2012. As shown in the cases of Ian Tomlinson, Joy Gardner and
Christopher Alder, jurors continue to be bamboozled by inadequate prosecutions
by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), raising serious questions about whether
CPS barristers can be trusted with these kinds of cases. Under the current
system, ex-police officers are investigating the police, and the CPS, usually
instructed by the police, is tasked with charging the police with manslaughter
or murder.

For public confidence in
the police complaints system to return, there is a need for a new watchdog and
prosecuting body that are demonstrably independent from any police force. The
watchdog that should replace the IPCC must have sufficient powers, resources
and will to robustly investigate police misconduct. It must treat the places where
people have died in custody as crime scenes, and it needs to be able to compel
officers to be interviewed as witnesses and suspects of a crime.

The Hillsborough Independent Panel,
as a body of experts and community representatives funded by the state but
genuinely independent from it, with a clear remit to “consult with the families
of those who died to ensure their views are taken into account” could provide a
potential model for a new watchdog. Funding should be made available for
independent prosecutions, should the new watchdog find evidence of criminality
on the part of police officers. The organisation should have a strong link with
the community in which a death in custody has occurred.

For large sections of working
class people – those subject to most police activity and force – it is clear
that there is one law for them, and another one for the police. But many families
and communities are fighting back. Recent public revelations about police misconduct
have come about because of the tireless work of families and communities fighting
to hold the police to account – and that is the only place from which justice can
be served.

About the author

Koos Couvée is a London-based journalist working in local newspapers. He writes about local government and communities,
multicultural Europe, the media, football, social policy, policing, and the
politics of race and class. He is one of the contributors to The Multicultural Politic.

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